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Americans Elect Leader: Mitt Romney doesn’t have Big enough Balls

Americans Elect is a corporation that wants to run its very own U.S. Presidential nomination vote in 2012. Is the corporation that picked itself to run a nomination picking the winners and the losers already, or is Americans Elect neutral?

No. Americans Elect, its directors, officers, and paid staff do not and will not support or oppose any particular candidate or particular draft effort for a candidate for the presidential or vice presidential nominations of Americans Elect—the organization simply provides the nominating process.

It’s not just an informal FAQ. The official corporate bylaws of Americans Elect declare that its leadership must maintain neutrality regarding presidential candidates. It’s not just that Americans Elect leaders can’t endorse a candidate; the bylaws stipulate that they are not supposed to act or communicate in support of or in opposition to any presidential candidate.

So what explains this declaration by Mark McKinnon (who is explicitly listed as part of the Americans Elect Leadership) on MSNBC’s Hardball show earlier this evening?

I think this is going to come down to who has the biggest cojones. And the American voters want strength and they want somebody bold. That’s the problem for Romney.

“By far the most important attribute of all is the perception of the candidate being strong. And you stack up Gingrich against Romney on that asset? He blows it away!”

How is that consistent with Americans Elect’s neutrality policy?

There’s probably a trivial answer to that. I’m reasonably confident that despite placing Mark McKinnon in the ranks of its Leadership, Americans Elect will be able to pull out some kind of policy exception, that McKinnon (whose title in the ranks of Americans Elect has not been revealed) is a Special Liaison or Confetti Director or some other kind of special sort of leader within Americans Elect doesn’t qualify under their standards. I’m reasonably confident about that because Americans Elect’s legal chief Daniel Winslow has already played that card after getting caught promoting his favorite candidate.

Beyond the trivialities, there’s a more troubling answer. The Americans Elect neutrality policy isn’t a technical detail. It’s there for a substantive reason. Americans Elect is running an election to nominate a candidate for president, all online on the americanselect.org website, not verified by local boards of election. If this is going to be seen as a legitimate voting process, Americans Elect is going to have to demonstrate that it is worthy of trust, that it’s not putting its finger on the scales, that it’s pushing the process or counting the votes in a manner that favors one candidate or discourages another. When Americans Elect Leaders start breaking neutrality and picking winners on national television, it’s fair to ask why we should trust that these people won’t be acting within Americans Elect to pick winners in a more meaningful way.

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About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

Oh, so it’s “bring back cowboy diplomacy!” ala George Bush now? Didn’t we get in enough trouble with this last time? i mean we’re STILL in Iraq and Afghanistan with no prospects of “winning” anything (except of course oil and mineral rights that we’re stealing for the corporations who are polluting the planet the most). After trillions of dollars down the drain, an economy in shambles, unemployment growing worse by the year (unless you count temp and McJobs), poverty increasing by double digits, the hollowed out middle class, main street and state governments, foreclosures still going on (illegally), financial shenanigans being ignored, rampant fraud and corruption on Wall Street and Washington, D.C., and the environment about to go postal on us – you think we’d learn!

I’m counting on a typically dirty and slanderous advertising campaign against Obama no matter which R candidate may be nominated, but they may be willing to nominate one of the big-balled un-electable candidates for the amusement of seeing Obama shouted down in the debates before he is re-elected to continue the imperial agenda.

Well, for those who want big balls, even con men have plenty of boldness, thanks to rehearsing their grandiose plans in advance. If anyone wants a guy who can’t balance his checkbooks to be the president, calling the vetoes or signatures in the midst of a recession, be my guest, I wouldn’t, and if Obama was as bad as Gingrich, I wouldn’t be voting for him.

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.